How To Control Your CPU Frequency In Ubuntu

Needless to say, conserving your battery power is the most important task when you are on the move with your laptop. Other than disabling all unused programs by shutting down them during the startup, one of the great way to save battery power is to reduce the running frequency of your CPU. The slower frequency the CPU runs, the less power it consumes.

On the top panel of your desktop, right click your mouse and select “Add to Panel”

In the window that open, scroll down and look for the entry “CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor“. Select the entry and click the Add button to add to the panel.

You should see something like this:

Next, open up your terminal and type:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure gnome-applets

You will see the following screen.

Select OK

When prompt if you want to start with root privilege, select Yes.

This will bring you back to your terminal.

Now back to your CPU frequency scaling applet on the top panel, when you click on the icon, it will display a list of frequency that you can choose from. There are also various modes that you can use to allow the system to auto-control the frequency of your CPU.

Depending on the configuration of your laptop, most Intel and AMD CPU are set to be Ondemand mode, which means it will run at the lowest frequency unless you are doing intensive tasks that require the extra power. However, when you are on your battery, it is best to set to Powersave mode so that it will always run at the lowest frequency.